Another album update

So little left to do, but damned if I could manage any of it for all of June and July.

I’ve bitched about this before, of course, all the inertia and indecision, much of which is a result of my changing musical preferences versus old material that I want to get out there…

Anyway, I thought I’d settled on a 13 song track list which I think I might have posted before:

Persona Non Grata

Whip the Dogs

The Trap I Am In Now

Mister Hyde

Taxidermy

When You Were Younger

Voodoo

Tell Me

Constrictor

Skin River

Membrane

Naive Again

Liberation

But something wasn’t sitting right.

I then thought, fuck it, toss four tracks and rearrange, so out went “Whip the Dogs,” “The Trap I Am In Now,” “Constrictor,” and “Membrane.”

But then that seemed off too.

After much fiddling around the last few days and listening to all the demos and sniffing around all my various notebooks, I decided to bring back “The Trap I Am In Now” and to add in a couple newer songs I’ve written on guitar but hadn’t gotten around to tracking yet: “American Man” and “Sideshow.”

I got the drums for those two done yesterday as well as scratch vocal and acoustic guitar tracks to guide me in making the bass lines and fleshing out the arrangements.

Which left 12 songs, and I kinda like 13 instead. After all, the working title of the album is Born in the Year of Death, referencing both my near-death experience last summer [July 2 2013] and me being born in 13 Anno Satanas [not that I really follow the CoS stuff anymore, but there ya have it… and 13 being the Death card in the Tarot for anyone not seeing the connection between the number and the title].

So back to my extra songs. I have about 20 half recorded songs aside from what is slated for the album, but none of them fit right, and the ones I eliminated from the above order are eliminated because I think they need more rewrites.

Back to the notebooks. Another dozen or more, but most of them didn’t feel right.

Except I was drawn to one set of lyric scraps from a couple years ago referencing self-righteous so-called rebel types. Holier than thou with their powdered noses, degenerates preaching their own morality so long as someone else’s taxes have to pay for their good deeds while they point fingers on Facebook.

Yes. That’s the one to fill that 13th slot.

Haven’t settled on a title yet but we’ll go with the last line of the chorus for now: “I’d rather be gone.”

Drums came together in less than an hour, will get the bass lines figured out for this one along with “American Man” and “Sideshow” on Thursday.

Everything else either just needs vocals or in some cases [“Persona Non Grata,” “Skin River,” “The Trap I Am In Now,” “Mister Hyde”] everything’s done except the final mix.

And this time I think everything’s a go and thus I shouldn’t have more long delays. I expect to have this album out to college radio [and available on iTunes, Bandcamp, yadda yadda yadda] by early fall.